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Sunday, June 16, 2013

E.H.U.D.: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Multicolored charts and graphs
flowed across the computer screen, showing bars of this and that, endless
streams of Gs, Cs, As and Ts; Xs, Ys. As
chart followed chart, Edgar grew bored.
He had spent the last two days caught up in the panic of his new medical
condition, and was taking this lull to free his mind and just think for a
moment.

Two days ago “free his mind” was
nothing more than metaphor, but now it was a reality. He could feel a connection to his body
slipping away, alien thought processes flitting in, touching him like errant
signals caught by an antenna. To one
side Amanda, concerned, suspicious. To
the other, his staff doctor, Frease, reserved, confused.

These feelings, these other senses,
had come with his awakening Friday morning, laying on the atrium floor, looking
up at the faces of his staff. Their eyes
were wide, lost. They were concerned,
but Edgar knew that it was concern for their own jobs, not his life.

Then Amanda had loomed over him,
concern for Ethan flowing down and around him.
The strength of her emotion struck Edgar like a charge of electricity,
stimulating his own memories of his son.
There were... not as many as he would have liked.

In the midst of the memories, the
realization hit him that he was experiencing other people's thoughts and
emotions. He gasped and sat up, felt
something dry and flaky falling from him.

Something connected in his mind,
and Edgar rushed ahead towards a looming realization: he had become a
Defender. He didn't know how, but he was
now hearing those around him though they did not speak, seeing through eyes not
his own.

A man with glasses, someone Edgar thought
he recognized as Isaac's staff doctor, leaned towards him. He said words, but Edgar heard only
thoughts. This is wrong, it can't
happen, not to him...

To me... What can't happen? What did happen? What would happen if people found out? Corruption charges: he saw the power of the
gods, coveted it, took it for himself.
Invalidation of yesterday's address: he knew more about the EHUDs than
he was letting on, was abusing it to his advantage.

He climbed to his feet; it was
easier than he remembered, took less effort.
The same effort was applied, however, and he found himself off-balance,
stumbling.

“No one...” The words burned as they rasped out. “No one speaks of this. No one tells anyone...”

He was so hungry... “I need food..”

“And what does that mean?”

Amanda leaned against him, pushing
his desiccated frame to one side by her now superior bulk.

“Well...” Frease flicked through a
couple of pages worth of charts on his tablet.
“Okay, you see this sequence here?”
He pointed to a written string of acids.
“This is from yesterday's samples.
This,” he pointed to another, “was from his checkup last year.”

Edgar looked between the two. He couldn't pull any meaning from the jumble
of Cs and Gs, but he could pull meaning directly from the doctor. He sensed Amanda's comprehension, but decided
to say it aloud anyway. “You're saying
my DNA is different.”

“Exactly.” The doctor lowered the computer. “I hate to tell you this, Mrs. Latterndale,
but medically, this isn't the man you married.
Close, a brother, say, but definitely distinct.”

He wasn't the man she had
married... It was hard not to laugh at
that; he hadn't been that man for years.
This was a deeper level, though, and he found himself wondering how it would
affect him. How much of him was
genetic, how much nature over nurture?
Could a change in genetics cause a change in spirit?

He had been disappointed in the
state of his spirit for too long—he regretted all the extra time he had put in
to work, the secrets he had kept from his family—

No, that wasn't him; that was
Amanda leaking in. She was
disappointed in him. It didn't bother him;
he found that he didn't care. He wanted
her to be safe, to be relatively happy, but he didn't care what she felt about
him now.

And neither did she. The more he pushed, the more he tried to tune
in to her thoughts, the more he found that the disappointment she felt for him
wasn't her own, but was harbored on behalf of Ethan. In her mind, Ethan was disappointed in
his absentee father.

Edgar knew it wasn't true—he had
felt the boy's overt concern for him when he had been woken and told that his
father had had an accident Thursday night.
Knew that Ethan's first instinct had been to run out and prove himself
to be every bit as heroic as Edgar had been, facing down Lemlin virtually
unarmed.

It was enough to slow Edgar, to
give pause to his never-ending urge to do his job. Personal responsibility always came first,
yes, but to whom was that responsibility due: his son, or his country?

Sitting in the kitchen, gorging
himself on whatever was at hand, he had dropped everything and walked,
trance-like, up to his son's room.

Responsibilities were shifting.

That changed when Ethan saw the
skeletal man in his doorway. Images dredged
up from old nightmares crawled into the room and stood alongside Edgar—his
body, cold and lifeless, crumpled on the White House floor, Lemlin standing
over him, triumphant. Edgar, riding in
an open-roofed car, his head jerking back and to the left even as a stream of
gore spewed from his forehead. Edgar,
dying a thousand ways, each leading to the corpse now standing in the doorway,
looking down at Ethan.

He returned to the kitchen.

As he sat alone, eating anything he
could lay his hands on, he reflected on what had happened, tried to separate
what he had seen from what he wished he hadn't.
In the end, the only conclusion he could be sure of was that the General
must have made himself into a Defender at some point, and then had turned him. Why? He
replayed what he could remember of his conversation with Bob, the day, six
months ago, that he became tangled up in this.

Mistlethwakey must have already
been one of them, had realized that the best way to use his powers was to
manipulate high-level politicians. Then
why give Edgar this gift—this curse—if all it meant was that Edgar had a better
chance of escaping from the General's thumb?

Well, for one, Edgar now had a
vested interest in making sure that Bob's designs for the EHUDs came to
pass. For two, Bob now had blackmail
material should Edgar deviate from the course.

Either way, only one conclusion
could be drawn. He downed a cup of
orange juice and stared at the kitchen wall.
“I can't trust Bob anymore.”

A flush of nervousness, brought on
by the lie. Strange that someone who
knew so many secrets felt guilty by telling what was, at worst, a half-truth.

“Why don't you tell me what's going
on, Mr. Latterndale?”

Syrup dribbled down into Edgar's
beard as he chocked down another chunk of waffle. He wiped at the syrup, licked it off his
fingers, and looked back at the doctor who had interrupted his solitude.

“Ged de fugg oudda of hewe.”

The doctor pulled out a chair next
to Edgar and sat down at the breakfast bar.
He gestured to the chef, then to the formless mass of flour and syrup on
Edgar's plate. “One for me.”

“I said—”

“Doesn't matter what you said. Being president does not mean you rule the
world; it means you're subject to the will of the people. You're obviously not well, so as one of the
people it's my duty to make sure you get well.”

Edgar grunted and took another
bite.

“We haven't been formally introduced. I'm doctor Todd Frease.”

Edgar tried to focus, to put as
much of his energy as he could into forcing the doctor away.

Frease's eyes widened for a moment,
then collapsed into a glare. “That's one
of the things that's wrong with you.
I'll have to make sure you get over that.”

The world stopped, and Edgar's mind
flashed up to Ethan, safe in his parent's bed, then back, across time and space
to the White House, September 12th.

When he returned to himself, Edgar
found his hand inching towards a butter knife laying on the counter.

Frease noticed, and scooted back a
few inches. “You have nothing to worry
about from me, sir. After all, I was
your cousin's trusted doctor for many years.”

Edgar blinked, not taking his eyes
from the doctor. He called to the chef,
“I think I need to be alone for a medical consultation, if you don't mind.”

“Sir.” The chef flipped out the half-liquid remains
of his current waffle, flicked off the iron, and left.

“What do you want, doctor?”

“I was on the Defender's medical
staff, in the early days of the program.
I know the symptoms, and I have to say, you've got the disease. A far more rapid strain than I've ever seen,
but I know I'm not wrong.”

“That doesn't tell me what you
want.”

The doctor nodded, scratched his
chin. “What I want depends on what you
want. Everything you said yesterday,
about solidarity with the Defenders, writing wrongs, all that bullshit? If you really meant that, I want to help
you. I can coach you a little on seeming
normal, on keeping this secret.”

Edgar looked into the doctor's eyes,
saw courage, fear, resolve, regret.
There was a period of about six months reflected in the man's eyes, six
months of nursing unwilling patients through painful transformations, through
cancers that swept through their bodies again and again. And through it all, he couldn't help them. He saw them suffer, made them suffer,
and now he was looking to atone.

Edgar nodded. “I don't know what happened; I didn't choose
this. But now I'm one of them, aren't
I? I've got more of an interest than
ever to help them.”

Frease returned the nod. “Your secret's safe from me. As long as you keep their best interests in
mind.”

Edgar extended his sticky, syrupy
hand to shake, but paused as the doctor's comment hit home. Of course he would keep the Defender's best
interests in mind. But they weren't the
only group he should be thinking of. “I
want my family kept out of this, as much as possible. You're the doctor; you come up with the story
that will keep my wife happy.”

“Why not?”

Frease leaned back in his chair and
began to play with his tablet. “Because
I'm still waiting on a definite answer from the CDC. Pointless speculation at this point might
lock us into certain assumptions, which might not be helpful when we find out
just what's going on.”

Edgar cleared his throat. “Any news on when that'll be, by the way?”

Frease didn't look at him. “At least a few more days.”

“I just don't want to risk
infecting anyone...”

Happy surprise tinged with
suspicion radiated from Amanda; she wasn't used to such selfless action from
her husband.

“Whatever it is, we've all been
exposed by now, so really, there's nothing more to consider from that end.”

“Good, then let me finish eating.”

Frease wiped off his hand, stood,
and left the kitchen.

Edgar finished, pushed his plate
away and went upstairs to shower. Every staff
member he passed along the way tried to push back against the wall, to avoid
the hairy man in the bathrobe who threatened the well-being of their day. Once in the Presidential suite's bathroom, he
took in the man hanging in the mirror: he looked deranged, ready to pounce and
kill someone with his bare hands... not that he appeared to have the strength.

He was in the shower, trimming his
beard, when a storm front of nervous indecision billowed into the room,
followed by Amanda. She leaned against
the door, her slow breathes sending swirls of cool air through the steam.

“Edgar.”

He turned down the water pressure
so he could hear her better.

“What's going on?”

How much did she know? He tried—clumsily—to push into her mind and
see, but all he was able to find was vague foreboding. “I'm sick.”

“I got that. What's really going on?”

“I'm sick.”

“There is no way that was
natural. I—I have suspicions, but—I want
answers, Ed. You can't keep me in the
dark forever.”

He turned the water all the way off
and stepped out of the shower. “Maybe it's
better in the dark.”

Amanda crossed her arms and stood
motionless as Edgar wrapped himself in a new bathrobe. She nodded.
“Maybe. But I'm not in the dark
anymore; no one is. The problem is,
though, is that I'm still treated as if I am in the dark, and so no one will
tell me what dangers are at the end of the light.”

“You're taking the metaphor too
far.”

She slammed her hand against the
door and lunged forward. “I'm trying to
protect my family! You're not making it
any easier! Two days ago we had a
full-scale riot a few miles from our house, then your cousin gets killed! Now this—” she gestured at Edgar, swimming
in the folds of the robe, “And you expect me to go along, business as
normal? No. No more.
Either you start telling me things, letting me know that my son is safe,
or we're gone. Do you hear me? Do you really understand? I'm tired of sitting under a table while you
put your life in danger to save the goddamn country.” The steam around her was swirling faster now.

Edgar put down the towel he had
been drying himself with and looked—really looked—at his wife. He saw past the beauty-queen smile, the
chemically-enhanced eye-lashes, the dermatologist's dream skin. He saw with more than just his eyes, felt the
energy boiling just beneath the
surface. And he knew that nothing he
said would comfort her. He had missed
his chance, long ago, and it was too late; she didn't need him anymore.

“I honestly don't know what's going
to happen. But I can promise you this:
you're safe here. Ethan's safe
here. This is just about the safest
place on earth right now.”

“What about last night?”

“I'm sick; that's all.”

“What about Defenders?”

“I'm going to take care of that
right now.”

She left, and soon after so did
Edgar. He dressed, finding all his
clothes too large, and went barefoot into the hall.

He just avoided colliding with
Ashby outside the door. “Good; I was
about to come find you.”

“Yes, sir. Doctor Frease is looking for you, sir. He wants to do some tests.”

“Good.” He followed her out onto the steps leading down
into the atrium. “I need to make some
calls; matters of state.”

She produced a large mobile and
passed it back to him. “Its secure.”

She left as they neared the small
clinic in the lower level of the compound.
Edgar continued on and found Frease inside.

“You're looking better,” the doctor
said.

“You said you could teach me to be
normal. Let's begin.”

“Not yet. Right now I want to do a check-up, take some
blood samples. I want to make sure this
is—”

“Shh.” Edgar held up a hand. “We were stupid earlier, in the kitchen. The walls have ears.”

Frease looked around, then fixed
Edgar with a skeptical stare.

Edgar raised the mobile and shook
it. “Can I make some phone calls while
you're sucking me dry?”

“You're the president.”

Edgar hopped up on an examination
table, slid a little on the wax-paper covering, and placed a call to Senator
Terstein. “Hey, Mitch. What?
Of course I'd call! I'm your boss
now, remember? I assume you saw my
speech? Good; I'm looking to end this as
quick as possible; I'll be drafting something to put what I said into effect on
our end. You still got Ahmad on your
team? Good. Okay; I'm currently down with something. I'm with a doctor right now. No, he's staff. Listen, when I'm back up, I want to meet with
you and Ahmad, and anyone else who'd be good for this. I know; this is a big concession. Probably illegal, too. But it'll be worth it if we can punch it
through. Yes. I'll get more to you later. Goodbye.”

He disconnected and looked over at
Frease, who was swabbing the inside of Edgar's elbow in preparation for a large
needle. “Q-bomb, buddy.”

Frease raised a questioning
eyebrow, and Edgar shook his head.

A needle jabbed into Edgar's arm.

Edgar ignored the pain, still aglow
from the call he had just made. Things
were in motion, the path to resolution and peace was now begun. And for the first time in over half a year,
he didn't feel like he was betraying anyone.

“Even without the concern of
infection, it's probably for the best if we all stay put for at least a week.”

The glow of freeing the Defenders
faded over the course of the weekend: Edgar had been in and out of the clinic
all day Friday and most of this morning; Amanda had skulked about, watching him
with silent trepidation; Ethan...

Ethan had come to him in his office
and stared at him from the door. “Hey,
dad...”

Edgar looked up from the law book
he was poring through. “What's up?”

“Just... just wondering if you were
okay.”

“Yeah, I'm fine, why?”

Ethan couldn't seem to make eye
contact with him. “You just look
different... and mom said to be careful around you.”

Edgar blinked; this wasn't
right. Amanda was turning their son
against him. Wasn't she? No... that wasn't his thought, his fear. It was Ethan, feeling torn.

“I'm fine buddy. I'm just...
Just making the country safe for you, all right?”

Ethan nodded.

“Everyone should be safe.” Frease turned away from the First Couple and
tossed his tablet onto a counter. “I
still want to screen everyone, though.”

He turned back and gestured to
Amanda. “I'd like to draw some blood
now, if you have the time.”

“Sure.”

The bodies in the room shifted
around. Edgar stood and stretched,
Amanda leaned against the examination table, and Frease prepped a needle.

In a moment they were done, and
Amanda led Edgar out into the hall. He
followed her up the grand staircase, then pulled up short as she stopped on the
upper landing.

“Whoa, warning next time, please.”

“I asked you what you were planning
on doing about the Defenders...”

Edgar blinked and ran through his
memory. He seemed to recall something to
that effect, days before. “I'm taking
care of them.”

Amanda turned; her eyes were puffy,
she looked on the verge of tears. “So
what was that, back with the doctor? Why
are you doing this, Ed? Why are you bothering
to keep it a secret?”

“I don't—“

“Just stop!” She took a deep breath, ground her
teeth. “I've suspected for months
now. You knew about the program, you
knew all the dark secrets. And I've
known since Friday.” Her voice fell to a
hoarse whisper. “I'm not blind,
Edgar! I'm not a fucking idiot, I can
figure out what's going on! I don't know
why you did it, or how, or—I don't care!
Just talk to me, tell me what's going on, don't keep me in the
dark! Have you ever thought that maybe I
could help you?”

Edgar heard her words, but all he
saw where bodies flying through the air, tables disintegrating, little booths
with white covered forms issuing from them.
And then he saw other forms, also white, floating through the light in
the void beside him. “It's better in the
dark, Mandy.”

She slowly shook her head. “I've been out of the dark longer than you
may think.”

Edgar opened his mouth to respond,
but the rapid clicking of shoes on steel echoed through the atrium and drowned
out anything he may have said.

Ashby appeared at the top of the
staircase, her face drained of color.
“Mr. President. We're evacuating
you. Now.”

“What—”

“Marine One is touching down on the
roof as we speak.”

Amanda lunged forward. “Where's Ethan?”

Ashby didn't look up from her
tablet. “He's been secured and is
waiting upstairs; we'll rendezvous with him on the way up.”

Edgar grabbed Amanda's shoulder and
tried to force calmness into her. She
slumped, so he focused his attention onto Ashby. “What the hell is going on?”

“Maria Ruiz has escaped with help
from her guard; we have reason to believe the guard may have given up the
location of this facility.”

“How could she know that?”

Ashby shrugged. “How could she smuggle the nation's most
dangerous criminal out of the fucking Pentagon?” She turned and marched away from the atrium,
into the building proper, confident the others would follow.

Edgar expected a burst of panic
from Amanda, but instead he felt cold resolve.

Ashby led them to a secondary
stairwell hidden in a concrete chimney running up through the compound. She ushered them in, then pressed a finger to
her ear and ordered, “Activate the scramblers.”

“No!” Edgar lunged forward and grabbed her
hand. “No scramblers!”

She looked at him, concerned that
this was somehow a result of his medical crisis. “Sir?”

Amanda was looking at Ashby, a
sense of piteous contempt exuding from her.

He was about to respond when the
shocking buzz of the scramblers burst through the walls. Before, they had been annoying, at worst
nauseating, but now the scramblers ripped through him, roiling through his
intestines and up past his esophagus, taking his mind and tearing it away from
the new world he had discovered.

Ashby furrowed her brow, made
connections best not made, and returned her hand to her ear. “Cancel that.”

A moment later, the scramblers
ceased, and Edgar slumped back against the safety rail. “Thank you.”

Ashby nodded, not taking her eyes
off him, then gestured up the stairs.
“Your son's waiting.”

When they were about half way up
the staircase, Amanda sidled up next to her husband and whispered, “No one's
going to be in the dark now.”

They pushed through the door at the
top of the stairs, found themselves in a walkway inside an exterior walls, and
met up with Ethan, his nanny, and two armored guards. Ethan broke free of his escort, hugged his
mother, and extended a hand to his father.
“What's going on?”

Edgar took the proffered hand and
led the family after Ashby. “Um... you
know that lady on AmeriNews, Maria?”

“Yeah?”

“She... she wants to talk with me.”

Amanda swallowed, her throat
convulsing. “It'll be alright, sweetie.”

“She's the one who killed Uncle
Isaac, isn't she?”

Edgar glanced at Amanda, who raised
her eyebrows and shrugged. “Yes. Yes she is.”

Ethan didn't say anything, but
Edgar could feel him steeling himself for what was to come.

Ashby led them up a second hidden
staircase, and then they were out in the chill night air, walking across the compound's
roof towards a large, green and white helicopter that was just settling down.

Edgar let go of Ethan's hand and
pushed him towards the helo as Ashby stopped and circled around to the rear of
the group. She put her hand to her ear
again, then froze mid-movement.

Edgar turned back to look at her,
found her standing perfectly still. He
gulped in a lungful of air to shout a warning, but found himself unable to
empty his lungs. A moment later his
chest tightened and he fell to his knees as pain wrenched through him. He tried to scream, but the pain was too
intense. He knew enough about basic first-aid
to recognize this as a heart attack. The
world began to turn red and hazy around the edges as the air he had sucked in
moments before began to turn toxic inside him.

Somewhere out in the ever receding
world was a presence peering into his mind, cool and disinterested. It didn't want to cause him pain, but it had
to kill him, and it had to look natural.
The presence calmed him, reassured him that his family would be safe,
his country would go on without him, all would be well...

Edgar heard the words, felt the
meaning, began to slip into them, to fall away from his body and let the world
go...

Red turned to black...

And everything was still...

…

…

A violent force shook him and the
world burst into crystal clarity. He was
still on the roof, still dying as cellular waste built up in his lungs. Two more minds had joined him, though, two
more presences to shore him up, remind him why he was there.

The first was small, frightened,
but unwilling to let go of him, urging him to stay and fight, to acknowledge it
and protect it. The second was a roiling
inferno of righteous indignation, focusing on and surrounding the smaller mind,
refusing to allow Edgar to leave, imploring—no, commanding—him that he could
not leave until the small mind was safe, until his duty was done and the
world was put right.

He latched onto these minds, these
primordial beings that he didn't have the strength to identify, honed in on
them, curled them down and into himself, pulled their energies down into his
chest until it was so full that it burst against the cold mind that wanted him
dead. He yelled, releasing the dead air
in him, pushing out his mind in every direction as a concussive wave, feeling
the glass walls of the house, the windscreen of the helicopter, everything bursting
and falling away. And then there he was,
seeing Amanda and Ethan, the guards, the helicopter pilots, all the world
frozen before him.

“Edgar! Do something!
You can't let him see you die!”

As quickly as he had come back to
his body, he left it, jumping out into the world, hunting for that—there.

His body burst forward, over
Ethan's shoulder, and at the guard standing nearest to him. He and the guard tumbled backwards, bounding
on the concrete, the armor coming off none the worse for wear, but Edgar's back
ripping open under his now tattered shirt.

They rolled, grey colossus
embracing frail human, to the edge of the roof and then tumbled down into the
once enclosed promenade. They landed, EHUD
down, then Edgar was thrown into the air, coming down hard in an evergreen a few yards away.

He fought to loose from the clawing
branches even as his opponent rose from the shattered glass and leapt at
him. He finally pitched himself forward
and fell from the tree an instant before Ruiz's meteoric impact broke the tree
off near the ground and sent it sliding away.

Edgar lay crumpled on the ground,
gasping, bleeding. Somewhere above he felt
his family, reeling and disoriented from his initial burst, their ears and
noses bleeding.

He tried to stand, found his legs
provisionally accepting of the task, and hastily strategized. There was little hope in defeating Ruiz
through single combat—she had an advanced combat suit, years of training. He was injured and only had a few months of
basic training from his time in the military.
She was well-versed in every form of psycho-kinetic combat He had some
theory gleaned from progress reports and two days of fumbling
experimentation. There was no way he
could hope to survive this.

A shadow passed over him and he
dodged just in time to be swept up in a wave of sod spreading out from Ruiz's
latest impact site.

Think. What would Bob do? No!
Don't think about Bob. Bob
got you into this. Bob suggested
you participate in treason, Bob tried to talk you into playing along
with his Messiah complex, Bob wasn't content to let you stay as a petty,
corrupt politician, and stroked your ego until you were ready to believe you
could actually rule the world. And you,
not Bob, listened. You pushed
yourself to the forefront of this war, dragging your family with you in your
own personal quest for glory.

He didn't know when it had
started—somewhere in the early stages of his tirade against Mistlethwakey—but
at some point Edgar had lunged forward again, a bundle of raw meat wrapped in
the bloody remains of a golf shirt, and had plowed into the immovable mass of
the EHUD, had forced his rage and self-pity and hubris into an impenetrable
mass of his own, letting it move his body in a strange dance. He dodged a swing powerful enough to take his
head off, ducked under the arm, jabbed the heel of his hand into the frill
surrounding Ruiz's neck, felt the internal structure buckle beneath his blow.

His left knee came up, landing
between the plates of armor on the right thigh.
Shockwaves rolled out, trying to spread the force of the impact, but the
knee sank deeper, pushing a layer of gel out through the skin of the suit,
sending the force of patella into femur, cracking both bones.

Ruiz let out a psychic scream of
pain, dropping Edgar back to the ground.
He scrambled to his feet, only to fall again as his leg buckled at the
knee. A quick burst of willpower, and
the bones snapped back into place, jabbing into surrounding muscle and staying
leg shaped through nothing more than hope and wishful thinking.

He rolled, pushed forward with his
right leg, and sent himself hurtling at the damaged leg before him. He collided with the rough armor, felt his
face pull away from his skull, but also the pillar of leg bending backwards,
pulling in on itself. Ruiz was down now,
and Edgar sat astride her chest, bludgeoning her head again and again with his
fists, his anger, his shame at failing as a father. With each blow the gel protecting Ruiz's head
sloshed around in new paths, meeting with and deflecting from previous waves of
energy, splashing around until the only outlet for the kinetic bombardment was
Ruiz herself.

Her mind was now a continuous fount
of terror; this wasn't supposed to happen.
An easy hit, that was all this was, a step towards getting on with a
normal life. She was in charge, she
was the one who was supposed to bring down the corruption with the purging
fire of the Q-bomb. Now—now she was
going to die. Her mind dropped in volume
as she realized that this would be the end of her life. With a last desperate plea, she ran to the
mirror, saw the elegant news anchor, begged her to come out and save her from
this fate.

A stream of gel jetted from between
two plates and the helmet split into two pieces, loosely connected by strands
of wet fabric. The familiar face of
Maria Ruiz looked out through the gore, her face marred by welts and
contusions, her honey-colored skin darkened by blood.

“Edgar... Please... it's me...”

Faded images... interviews for
shows, off-camera camaraderie, a shared history going back years, trickled from
her mind into his. It faded, shrunk to
just a few recent images as it struck
his mind, found nearly all the memories missing.

“Oh... That was all Bob...”

Edgar yelled, brought his arm down
again—and it was over.

He slumped onto the felled giant,
and started to cry. Exhaustion,
confusion, unspent rage forced its way out, and left him with no anchor in the
waking world...

A jarring pain in his leg brought
Edgar screaming back to consciousness.
He was back inside the clinic, overhead lights burning into his eyes.

“Hold tight, mister
president.” Frease was somewhere nearby,
though the blurred, mushy sound of his voice made it impossible to
pinpoint.

There was another jerk on Edgar's
leg, and he felt the bones pulling apart, and then sliding back together.

“Okay! POTUS stabilized, he's ready to fly!”

Two EHUDs lumbered into the
room. They stood, one on each end of
Edgar, and lifted the stretcher he lay on.
Moments later, they were on the roof.

Marine One sat off to one side, its
rotors dead, all the windows gone, blown inwards. Another chopper was next to it, rotors in
full swing, ready to fly. They didn't
sound right, though. They were muffled,
far-away sounding. Edgar reached up and
felt a rivulet of brittle crust trailing from his ear.

As they neared the helo Edgar made
out a cluster of other EHUDs surrounding what appeared to be prisoners near the
an open bay door. The EHUDs parted and
he glimpsed Amanda and Ethan, looking tired and disheveled. Water glistened on the sides of their faces
where blood had been washed away.

There was a feeling of
weightlessness while Edgar's escorts jumped aboard the helicopter, then lowered
him to the deck. They turned away and
huddled together. Edgar pressed outward
from himself, fighting past a wave of nausea and exhaustion, and felt them
discussing where exactly they would strap him in. He pressed farther and felt a disturbance
just outside the helicopter, centering around his family.

He jerked sideways, giving himself
enough momentum to roll off the stretcher and to the door. His escorts noticed and turned to help him,
but found themselves disinterested in the little man on the floor and returned
to their conversation.

“Mandy, what's going on?”

Amanda looked down on him, her eyes
empty. “I'm not going, Ed.”

One of the soldiers protecting her
stepped forward. “We need to leave,
sir.”

“I'm not going,” she repeated. “Neither is Ethan.”

Ethan, standing beside her,
whimpered.

“Sir, we can't put this off. Permission to sedate FLOTUS for ease of
conveyance?” After saying this the
soldier turned away with a sudden fit of racking coughs.

“Mandy, what are you doing?”

“What are you doing,
Ed? You... you just turned into a monster back there and
killed someone. I mean, you saved us,
but...” Her unspoken words, this is
all your fault, stood out plainly.
“I can't go with you; as long as you're tied up in this, you're not safe
to be around. I should have seen that
years ago.”

An image flashed through her mind:
Lemlin, lording over the East Room, Edgar standing tall before him. This time, though, it was not seen from
beneath the apparent safety of a table, but from eye-level, moving closer. This time, Amanda was not a passive player,
waiting for her husband to do his job.

“What does Ethan want?” He looked at his son, who took a step away
from his mother and awkwardly hugged Edgar's head.

“I love you dad. I don't want to leave, but—I—” He let go of his father and hugged himself,
convulsing in fits of nervous shivers.
“Why was she trying to kill you dad?
You had nothing to do with the EHUDs!”

“I'll... I'll tell you when I can
figure that out.” He looked back up
Amanda. “I'm not the man you married.”

“I don't think you ever were.”

He nodded, then slumped onto the
deck and let his escorts roll him back onto the stretcher.

Responsibility still nagged at him,
though. Even if she didn't want him,
Amanda was still his wife, his family.
He couldn't just leave her alone.
He tried to think of where she'd be safest, where she could go that the
Defenders couldn't reach her. And then
the answer came to him, shining like a beacon.
There was no safer place than the lair of the beast itself, the creature
that was unconcerned when Lemlin walked in, who had coolly calculated lines of
succession even as the corpses of the dead cabinet members were still warm and
wet. Everything in him railed against
this conclusion, but in the end, he realized that it was the only way he would
ever have peace of mind.

“Can I give you one last bit of
advice?” he called over the noise of the engine. From the corner of his eye he saw her
nod. “Bob has some real-estate in
Philadelphia. You really want to know
everything, want to help me? Bob can
tell you anything you want to know, and nothing on earth is going survive
getting on his bad side. You go to him,
you'll be safe from anything. Call him;
he'll get you settled.” He saw her nod
again.

He looked at the soldier he had
sent away coughing. “Make sure they get
to General Mistlethwakey, okay? They're
not going wherever I'm going.”

“Sir—”

“That's an order.” He wasn't sure if he could give orders of
this type, but he wasn't in the mood to be rational right now.

Just as the EHUDs were closing in
to take his family away he called out one last time to Ethan. “Hey, Ethan!”

Ethan looked back at his father.

Edgar wracked his mind for
something to say, a lasting bit of wisdom or encouragement he could leave to
his son in case they never met again.
Nothing came up. “Listen to your
mom, okay?”

Ethan's eyes remained locked onto
his as Frease hopped aboard, the doors were shut, and the helicopter lifted
into the sky.

Not for the first time, Edgar
realized that it was too late for him to do anything different. “Todd?”